


The Haunt of Twilight

by poisontaster



Category: Farscape
Genre: Backstory, Forced Bonding, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-29
Updated: 2005-12-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 03:47:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2214630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This is not how it was.</i> Mild spoilers for Self-Inflicted Wounds</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Haunt of Twilight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AstroGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/gifts).



Most think that the Stykera are born.

It's a rather logical assumption, I suppose; after all, who would ask for powers as terrible as those that have fallen to me? Not I, certainly. But then, no one _did_ ask me.

 

**I. Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book.**

“He _is_ a nervous child, is he not?” Gaima fans her face with a fold of paper, rocking fretfully on the barrel of _krellik_ meal.

“Yes.” Mother’s sigh is long-suffering and resigned. She doesn’t even look up from shelling _sha_ peas into her bowl. “He’s always been like that.”

“Your other boy wasn’t like that at all, an I recollect.” Gaima spits into the dust, very close to his foot. He yelps, throws his hands into the air and dances away, imagining what vitriol must be contained in such bitter liquid. Best not get any on him.

“No,” Mother agrees placidly and doesn’t look. She doesn’t like to look. He knows that. He knows what she sees; a boy strung together of too many elbows and knees (even though it’s really only the normal amount, it only looks that way).

“Might be something you could do ‘bout that,” Gaima says thoughtfully and scratches her nose.

Mother looks up.

 

**II. And Now My Eyes Are Closing.**

When the Banik were a free people—or so the stories go, because who can remember that far back—the Stykera had great temples, rising high above their cities to touch the very heavens. But those days are gone, and now there is only a falling down hovel in the center of the barracks, bastardized sacred signs scrawled on the permstone in mud and clay and a curtain of _ghastak_ wool across the arch.

“But Mother, I don’t _want_ to go,” he whispers and drags his heels in the dust. The Stykera have always frightened him. The ugly and confining masks like demon faces, the chanting, the stinking clouds of incense, the endless parade of hurting dead. Those who go into the houses of the dead do not return. Even those who emerge under their own power are not those who went in; it shows in their eyes, in the slump of their shoulders. They look the same, sound the same, but he’s never been fooled.

Mother doesn’t answer, just jerks his arm a little harder so he thinks it’s going to be pulled from the socket. She hasn’t said a word the whole way. The only reason he knows they’re going to the Stykera at all is because his brother told him so in his sing-song jeering voice.

Mother’s angry. He doesn’t think it’s with him for a change, but he can see it, almost taste it on his tongue like metal. He wants to ask her why, but her expression, the steely burn of her eyes holds his tongue.

One of the Stykera meets them at the ruin that passes for a holy place; a woman with a single eye of clearest green and a soft, flat mouth. He comes to a halt in the middle of the way, but he’s only a boy. The Stykera holds out her hand and his mother pushes him hard, into that waiting grip.

 

**III. So This is Goodbye.**

_This is not how it was._

How often does he hear those words? Too often, because what do slaves have to hold onto, once even the ownership of self has been ceded and too cheaply? The stories of the Banik have no value to anyone and thus are left in their hands to hoard as they will, and they all begin the same.

“This is not how it was,” the Stykera tells him. He rocks in the dust and hums a tuneless song, trying to pretend none of this is real. Mother will come back for him. She will. “In times long past, when we were free and we lived to see our old ages, the Stykera were different than we are now.” She puts a hand over his thin chest and tilts her head as if she can hear the flittering beat of his heart through her fingers. “There is only a tiny spark in you now. Hardly bigger than a fireplace coal. But as you grow, so will it.” She thumps him in the breastbone and he rocks back a bit, his tune interrupted.

“You must be careful, though. That which burns, consumes. Controlled, fire can warm, cook. Uncontrolled, it can kill. You must learn the difference.”

“Isn’t that what you do?” he asks then, genuinely curious. “Kill?”

Her look is horrified, even one-eyed. “What have they been teaching you?” she demands and tugs cruelly on his ear. “Of course we do not! We are not murderers, boy, we are Stykera! All that lives will die, whether we will it or not. But it was given into our hands the power to ease the way.”

 

**IV. Can Only Take So Much.**

Later, he learns her name is Hethys, which was also the name of one of the gods, when the Banik worshipped such things. She is the youngest of the Stykera, but she’s worn the mask since she was only four cycles old. The Eldest says that Hethys’s flame burns very brightly.

Eldest is the oldest person he’s ever seen. Her hair has rubbed away where the straps cross her skull and what’s left is white as _narblok_ fur. Her hands have dried to bent little claws and she holds them close to her chest. Still, it’s she that holds him down when they fit him with the mask, crooning little crib songs into his ear. She holds him, too, when the fitting is over and he sobs hot tears into the soft dusty crepe of her neck.

“I don’t want to,” he cries as she rocks him. “Please, don’t make me, I don’t want to!”

“Hush,” she whispers, over and over, soft as the wind through the leaves. “Hush.”

 

**V. I’m Weak and I’m Dying.**

He knows this is the day, when Hethys brings him into the room they call the Womb of the Earth. The Eldest is there, almost like an idol of clay herself with her brown skin and dirt colored robes. She doesn’t look up and Hethys leaves them alone.

He wants to run, he does. But he doesn’t. He can’t.

The mask-- _his_ mask—is in her hands.

“Come here,” the Eldest says and holds out her hand.

He doesn’t want to. He wants his Mother, even though he’s given up any hope that she will come for him. Once he does this, once he takes those brittle fingers, he will be like all the others. What comes out of this charnel house will no longer be the boy that went in. He will be truly and irrevocably Stykera, the Walking Death.

“Please,” he whispers, trembling on that threshold. Something, a cold wind that stinks of ozone, whispers over his bones and prickles all his hair. _“Please.”_

“Come here,” the Eldest says again, implacable. Her eye, blue and sharp as ice, bores into him and brings him forward like a _kreshtek_ to heel.

 

**VI. Calling Me Back to Myself.**

From Hethys, he knows that Eldest is one of the oldest Stykera still living. He knows this, but he doesn’t understand what this means until she takes his hand and they fall, down and deep into the ground, the bones of the earth.

He is drowning in an ocean of dirt. There is no air here and he writhes, frantic and afraid. It’s a trick, he thinks. They never meant him to be Stykera at all, only one of the many corpses ushered quietly from the back alley under a anonymous drape. And there will be no one to sing the funeral songs for him.

“Be still,” the Eldest says sharply and though his mind doesn’t listen, his body does. He lies curled against her like a fetus and wonders if this is what it is to die.

“You must know the way, before you can guide anyone along the path,” she tells him. Her fingers comb across his shaven skull like affection and her single eye is the only light in the cavernous dark. “Before we were alive, we were dead, and when we are done, it is to death we will return. But death is not an ending. It is only a Way.” Her hands leave him, and he hears the soft clank of buckles. “I will show you.”

Her mask, pitted with age and rust falls away, and suddenly he is thrust from darkness into light.

He screams.

 

**VII. On the Wings of My Heart.**

He screams a lot, those first days.

They tie his arms because, freed, he will claw at the buckles and try to tear the mask from his face, run his fingers over the place where the skin, the bone used to be. His control is so weak as to be nonexistent; energy weeps from beneath the metal like sunlight tears.

He’s too small; he can’t hold it all.

All those _cycles_ ; the weight of them presses him flat until he gasps for breath and Hethys comes and slams her fist on his chest until his heart remembers how to beat again.

“It should not be like this,” he hears her say to Khalle worriedly. They are at the other end of the house, but he hears them, clearly as if they held their conference over his bed. “It should not take this long.”

“She was very old,” Khalle agrees. “Perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps he is a flawed vessel after all.” She shrugs, a collision of molecules he can feel in every jumpy muscle of his twitching body. “There is little we can do now, except ease his passage, should he fail.”

“So much knowledge.” Hethys sounds regretful. Well, she would. “We have lost so much, Khalle, under the yoke and the lash. How much more can we afford to lose?”

“We were dead before we were alive and when we are done, it is to death we will return,” Khalle answers, though she is not as serene as her words would make her seem. “So it is with us, so it is with knowledge. He will bend or he will break. He will live, or he will die.”

Tied flat to a bed a dozen yards from them, he thinks: _I already died once. Never again._

Sometimes, now, later, it makes him cry, how very, very wrong he was.

 

**VIII. Not Crazy, Just a Little Unwell**

This is not how it was.

Or rather it is, but only one of many.

This is what I learned, the truth that even the Eldest did not understand: Death is not a Way, it’s a wave. It can pull you in its wake and drown you, or you can ride it from one life to the next, one death to the dozenth, hundredth, infinitum.

I didn’t know this either, until her.

She was with me once. She will be with me again. And in some worlds, real and imagined, she’s with me now.

We all give forever a name; I give it hers.

Forever.

Zhaan.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://astrogirl2.livejournal.com/profile)[**astrogirl2**](http://astrogirl2.livejournal.com/) for the 2005 Uncharted Elves exchange.


End file.
